Independent Corsica may be a place too far for the French

The Matignon Accords on the autonomy of Corsica are often compared here to the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland. "A Cuncolta [the political wing of National Front for the Liberation of Corsica or FLNC] has been in contact with Sinn Fein for the past 25 years," Mr Jean-Guy Talamoni, the nationalist leader who was the chief architect of last month's agreement, said in an interview at his holiday home in this northern Corsican village.

"We sent envoys to meet Gerry Adams four or five times. The Good Friday agreement influenced our decisions. It showed that without addressing questions linked to your ultimate goals - the unification of Ireland for the IRA, the independence of Corsica for us - you can reach an accord that allows you to defend your positions in an exclusively political way, in a calmer framework."

Mr Talamoni believes the agreement negotiated with the French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, over 11 months will ultimately result in independence for Corsica. At least three of Mr Jospin's cabinet ministers - chief among them the interior minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Chevenement - think so, too, and they strongly oppose the agreement because they say it threatens the unity of France. Corsica is tearing the French government apart, will be a major topic of debate in the National Assembly in Paris this autumn and may dominate the 2002 French presidential campaign.

All of which pleases Mr Talamoni immensely. "I never considered myself French. I never sang and I will never sing La Marseillaise. I have my own flag, my own national anthem." His father, a school teacher, began taking Jean-Guy to autonomist rallies when he was eight years old. Mr Talamoni was 16 when the FLNC was founded in 1976, and he immediately became the head of a lycee students' union that supported the armed group.

Mr Talamoni spent four years "on the continent", studying law in Aix-en-Provence. Today his political party, Corsica Nazione, is the largest on the island, with 17 per cent of the vote in the last elections. His central role in negotiating the Matignon Accords has brought him notoriety, and he is challenging the long-time mayor of Bastia, whose father was mayor before him, in coming municipal elections.

"Over the past 24 years I belonged to all the legal organisations that shared the ideology of the clandestine groups," Mr Talamoni says. During the 1993-1995 "civil war" between Corsican nationalists he went underground. Has he participated in "armed actions"? A grin spreads across his face and he says "No" with a laugh. "Frankly, there are not a lot of people who will tell you they have. I was ready to flee if necessary. I was ready to go to prison."

Today Corsican nationalists are debating whether the armed groups should be disbanded. "We are for clandestinity," Mr Talamoni says of his own party. "It has been our strategy for 30 years. We haven't changed, because everything we obtained until now we got through political violence.

"We'd have got nothing - not the first special status [in 1981], nor the second special status [in 1989] nor a university in Corsica. Political violence had extremely positive effects, although there were obvious drawbacks. We want to build peace, but peace is not tranquillity. Peace means building something that enables the Corsican people to control their own destiny."

The French constitution will have to be altered if, as foreseen in the Matignon Accords, the Corsican territorial assembly is allowed to change French laws from 2004. The agreement reunites the island's two administrative departments, exempts Corsicans from death duties for 10 years - to fend off "continental" Europeans buying property on the island - and provides for the mandatory teaching of the Corsican language in schools.

"For 200 years the French tried to force us to be French," Mr Talamoni explains. "They denied our humanity by refusing to let us teach our language. It was a methodical attempt to destroy our roots. Teachers had instructions to beat children when they spoke Corsican."

Violence has not stopped since the agreement was ratified by the Corsican assembly on July 28th. Mr Jean-Michel Rossi, a dissident nationalist leader who revealed the seamier side of the militants in a book entitled All Accounts Settled, was assassinated on August 7th. There have been three bomb and rocket attacks on public buildings this month, one of which injured civilians in Ajaccio.

Mr Talamoni claims he doesn't know who is behind the violence, but insists these acts are "aggressions against the peace process". "There have been similar events in Ireland - the Omagh bombing," he said. "Obviously, at the beginning of a peace process there are people who want to sabotage it. In Paris there are people who are very hostile to the agreement. I tend to think it's coming from France."

Incredible as the allegation seems, there is the precedent of the previous French prefect in Corsica, who stands charged of orchestrating the destruction of a beach restaurant and who, according to documents in the investigating magistrate's file, planned to machinegun nationalists' homes to reignite fighting among militants.

This month's violence has strengthened opponents of the Matignon Accords. Under pressure from his own political allies, the Prime Minister, Mr Jospin, wrote in the Nouvel Observateur: "If the attitude doesn't change in Corsica, if the elected representatives of the island don't assume their responsibilities, if the violence continues, a constitutional revision [to enact the accords] would appear . . . unjustified."

Mr Talamoni reacted angrily to Mr Jospin's suggestion that the accords are reversible. "We're not schoolchildren," he said. "We'll `behave' when we decide to. Corsican nationalists don't take their orders from Paris.

"We're not so pretentious as to think we could win a war against the world's fourth military power, but haven't made all these sacrifices - we haven't seen French courts hand down hundreds of years in prison sentences, we haven't buried friends - to give up now. There will be no Corsican nationalist surrender. Let that be clear."

An amnesty for several dozen Corsican nationalist prisoners and militants on the run, including the suspected killer of the prefect, Mr Claude Erignac, is the other issue that threatens the Corsican peace process. Buildings along the winding coast road leading to Mr Talamoni's village are daubed with graffiti saying "Liberta per i patrioti". But Mr Jospin says there can never be an amnesty for the men who murdered Mr Erignac in February 1998.

"It will come in due course," Mr Talamoni insists, alluding again to Northern Ireland. "And obviously, the amnesty must apply to all. A few weeks ago they closed the Maze prison and freed militants from both sides, some of whom committed murder. It was very hard for the families of the victims, but Tony Blair didn't flinch. He said it was the price of peace."

Mr Talamoni seems to think there should be a special dispensation for what he calls "political offences". "The motivation makes a difference," he says. "It's clear that the man who shot Prefect Erignac wasn't robbing a bank or racketeering. It was obviously a political act."

He adds bitterly that close to 200 people, many of them gendarmes and Corsican nationalists, had already died in the conflict. "But France doesn't seem to care about them. A prefect had to die for people to realise the gravity of what was happening in Corsica."